구성 1번: 네 개의 선이 있는 마름모

Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg had built the De Stijl group together in the Netherlands, and around 1924 they fell out over a line. Van Doesburg had started tilting his bars to 45 degrees and calling it the next stage. For Mondrian the horizontal and the vertical were the whole basis of the thing, and he left the group.

His answer was to tilt the canvas instead. This is a square, about 75 centimetres each way, hung on its corner, and every line inside it is still level or upright. Rotating the support also bought him length, since the longest run across a diamond is greater than across the square it started as.

He painted it in Paris in 1930. There are four lines, and none of them cross inside the picture. The crossings would fall just outside the edges, so what hangs on the wall behaves like a piece cut out of a grid that keeps going past the frame.